I was very pleased with that. I put it at the end of the thing I’d posted, in fact, in the edit I made about a week later, and about ninety people told me it was beautiful.

It took another four years, and my daughter turning fifteen, for me to find out how much of that afternoon I had never once thought to ask her about.

End of Part One.

Part Two

Chapter 12 — Sixteen

Max stopped being able to do the back step in February.

It had been coming for about a year — the slow slide of the hips on the kitchen tile, the extra beat before she got up, the way she’d started sleeping through the sound of the front door, which for a dog who had spent six years listening for one specific woman’s footsteps was the thing that told me most.